#5 Go ahead and try the new thing with your hair

beardy on main

May 02, 2020

Actual Updates

The only real news I have from this month is that I shaved my head, finally, after years of hemming and hawing about it. And “shaved” is a strong word - buzzed, definitely, but I didn’t go full cueball. The reviews are good, and - look. I’m not going to do false modesty with a bunch of people who deliberately signed up to read a newsletter that I write. I was fairly confident going in that it would look okay! I feel like my facial features can stand up to a no hair situation. The concerns I had were twofold: the “do I have a lumpy head?” concern that everyone about to shave their head or just go bald has, which proved to be fine, and then the “Zippy the Pinhead” problem. See, I have a small head. I know that. I can wear child-size hats. I once purchased a pair of heart-shaped, sparkly, blue sunglasses from the kids’ section of Target when we were in Denver for air guitar nationals (shoutout to the original megabed!). The rest of me, meanwhile, may be short, but it isn’t small, so I was worried that without the extra volume of hair to balance things out, I’d look like a peanut head. And I kind of do! But it’s ok, because During These Times, everyone only sees you from the shoulders up on a Zoom or what have you anyway, so it doesn’t look so obvious.

I am similarly loving everyone else’s dramatic hair decisions - other fuzzy buddies, sing out! - and, of course, the quarantine beards. Beard growers, you’re doing the lord’s work right now, keep it up. You’re goddamn right I said that out loud.

In other news, did you know that demand for potatoes has dropped so much (due to restaurants not ordering them in volume anymore) that potato farmers are having to throw out their crops? And this despite the fact that we have personally bought a bag of spuds with every grocery order. Buy a potato today to save … potatoes. SOS: Save Our Spuds. Channel your inner Samwise Gamgee. Look, I don’t know, I’ve left the house 3 times in the past month and a half and I’m running out of interesting ideas.

Oh! Wait! I do have one interesting idea. You know how I throw a whack of tunes into each of these things? I’m batting around the notion of chucking them all into a playlist at the end of the year and sharing that out, is that too stupid? I literally cannot tell if any ideas are stupid anymore.

WAIT. LATE-BREAKING NEWS. Apparently Great Scott (a music venue here in Boston where I’ve seen some of the best shows I can remember) will not be reopening, when places where people congregate can reopen again. This is awful. I am really bummed about it even though I go out to shows a fraction of the amount I used to. So, I know I said that I couldn’t tell if ideas are stupid, but this is stupid. Don’t be the landlord of this building who declined to renew Great Scott’s lease after 44 years, in the middle of a pandemic. Ugh, this sucks so much.

Time for some articles

I certainly hope everyone’s going to come out of this quarantine some amount gayer than they went in (if possible); looking at these book covers may help with that: A Gallery of Legendary Lesbian Pulp Fiction Novel Covers

I assume you’ve all seen this since it’s literally a month old but just in case, it’s nuts: Coronavirus lockdowns have changed the way Earth moves

I didn’t realize this article was, uh, 8 years old, but it’s still true, and Mark Twain or whoever was wrong: there are lies, damned lies, and recipe writers saying you can caramelize onions in 5-8 minutes. Layers of Deceit

Rae Spoon is an artist I love (and whom I just realized I’ve been a fan of for north of 20 years, coolcoolcool, time just keeps on continuing to happen, great) - that song I was singing in the last issue is one of theirs - and they recently got a cancer diagnosis. You would think that would be hard enough to deal with, but no, the medical system has to make things infinitely worse. Their essay on it is amazing, and it is here: I Can’t Separate My Non-Binary Gender From My Body That Has Cancer

Some tunes I’ve been into lately

Fun fact: I tried to sing this one as a Quarantine Song of the Day but quickly learned that I can be completely destroyed by “woo-oo”s. What a disaster. Listen to a pro instead.

No special comment here. Gas Huffer is just good. Let’s all listen to more Gas Huffer.

I like Sloan all the time; I’ve been listening to a lot of them lately for no real reason, and then two things happened. The Great Scott closure makes me think of them, because I saw them play there a few years ago and it was excellent, and then, of course, they’re in my head as being a Nova Scotia band (whether that’s strictly accurate or not) and Nova Scotia’s on everyone’s mind and heart lately after the horrible shooting that just occurred there. So I was going to share something of theirs anyway, but now I really need to. So here’s a classic.

This month’s top 5: Books I’ve read while avoiding finishing Chuck Palahniuk’s Adjustment Day, which I am about 60 pages into and already terribly annoyed by

  1. Not one but two Hap & Leonard books (Joe R. Lansdale); I felt it should count as one item even though they’re two separate stories about the same people

  2. A book on the various barn dances and other country music gatherings of rural Kentucky

  3. Issue #2 of Undiscovered Country, which is a comic about what if the US isolated itself not only politically but also physically and communication…ally, and then, in the midst of a pandemic, some people manage to get back in

  4. I just got the Dungeon Master’s Guide so I’m about to read through that so that I’ll be ready to run the campaign I’ve been casually kicking around in my mind when I get a chance - I know, I know, neeerrrrdddd

  5. I didn’t think this through (and I also think I’m forgetting another book), but, uh, does Twitter count

Ok, time for your humble correspondent to go to bed; also, if you’ve got nothing to do on the 24th (imagine “having something to do”), you’re invited to my internet birthday party. I don’t know what that means but I’ll get to see your face, probably, and that is all the present I want. Talk to me on whatever means of communication we use for details (note: they don’t exist yet).

Reply

or to participate.